I'm impressed that they'd fund such research, and I hope they find good results.

50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income. And I think that, combined with innovation driving down the cost of having a great life, by doing something like this we could eventually make real progress towards eliminating poverty.

We’re looking for one researcher who wants to work full-time on this project for 5 years as part of YC Research. We’d like someone with some experience doing this kind of research, but as always we’re more interested in someone’s potential than his or her past. Our idea is to give a basic income to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period, though we’re flexible on that and all aspects of the project—we are far from experts on this kind of research. We’d be especially interested in a combination of selecting people at random, and selecting people who are driven and talented but come from poor backgrounds. We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or nationally distributed.